Monthly Archives: April 2016

A third submission to this week’s photo challenge on the theme of Abstract, but could equally qualify for last week’s dinnertime photo challenge too.

Whilst waiting for dinner at a Pizza Restaurant on our last night in Kigali we messed around with exposure and movement resulting in some abstract family pics. We possibly love inked a little silly as we moved about but thankfully the restaurant was quiet. The pizza at Sole Luna was excellent, by the way.﻿

Like this:

A second submission to this week’s photo challenge on the theme of Abstract.

Taken on the return journey from Rwanda as we crossed the Busisi Ferry we were bombarded by tens of thousands of Lake Flies. These were swarming around the floodlights on the boats and at the suggestion of my son we took a long exposure picture of their flight paths.

Each insect illuminated by the beams and blurred into a mesh of patterns, almost fur like.

Like this:

This is the first and possibly the last of a series reflecting on some of my music collection which may or may not resonate with life here.

Power, Corruption and Lies is one of the first albums I ever bought, on tape for my Walkman – the iPod of it’s day, a portable music player which allowed you to insert a cassette tape giving you up to 45mins of unbroken music (whilst it’s batteries lasted).

The album by New Order was amazing and even today 33 years on I like to listen to it’s tracks. On the cassette version there were a number of extra tracks, the most famous track is Blue Monday which is a classic. Mum used to hear the thumping intro (dum dum d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d dum dum) and call up the stairs to “turn that music down”. The song incidentally was the biggest selling 12″ of all time.

Sadly the tape eventually wore out and a Vinyl album was bought later to be replace by MP3 versions.

Why do I share these facts? In truth life here in Tanzania can often resonate with the title of this track. I mostly share the positive side of life here, to do otherwise would be depressing, but sometimes it seems like we’re living in the title of this particular album – “nuff said”.

Every so often we like to escape Mwanza and head out West along the lake to a restaurant called Papa’s. As well as a meal you get to see some wildlife with your dinner. Here from a selection of visits over the past 18 months, is my contribution to the Weekly Photo Challenge: Dinnertime

Each New Year we towards the Future with hope and anticipation. No New Year was more anticipated than that of the new millennium which as far as we were concerned was Dec 31st 1999/Jan 1st 2000 (I know there is debate about whether it really should have been a year later!).

We travelled with the family to Penzance in Cornwall for a family celebration. This was early in the days of the Internet, before Social Media and Smartphones (we had one mobile phone between us and it was a Nokia 8210, on which the most advanced technology was texting!). We still used film in our cameras and played music on the newly invented CD or old fashioned tape/vinyl.

Looking to the future in 1999 we thought hopefully on the future – the Cold War was over and we had not imagined the horrors of 9/11 or 7/7 etc.

We were a family of three and lived in the UK – little did we anticipate that we would be living and working in Africa with two teenage children less than 15 years on.

New Year’s Eve 1999 – Family Celebration in Penzance, Cornwall

Millennial Candle

New Year’s Day Walk 2000 – Cornwall

Who know what the future holds – it is an unknown factor over which we have only a little control.